Apple's multimedia foundation, QuickTime, was released to the public 20 years ago today.
Initially provided as an Extension for the classic Mac OS – folk were running System 6 back then – QuickTime's ability to show tiny windows of video was premiered in May 1991 at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
QuickTime 1.0 …

Really??

I'm not a fan of Quicktime by a real stretch, but are you just inventing stuff? iPhone users may send me a video, but it's recorded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, the sound is MPEG4-AAC. It's an ISO standard, and has been for around 10 years now. Bear in mind that in the video world, there has never really been a video codec standard, just a mish-mash. Theora is the open source best example, and is aiming to ape MPEG-4.

I've also never seen iTunes installed on anyone's machine unless they meant to do it, I'm not aware of any installer that sneakily puts it onto a machine.

Agendas? Apple-hating and assuming everything is bad, yup, I see the agenda.

Small problem.

The STREAMS inside might me ISO standard, but it's conveniently wrapped in a Apple proprietary MOV container which isn't ISO standard and you therefore need Quicktime to play it... There are some other subtle differences too, enough to break compatibility.

I'm guessing Apple could have easily made it ISO compliant and gotten rid of the need for Quicktime, but it suited their business model if they could sideload iTunes onto everyones PC as a quicktime trojan.

Turns out if you have QuickTime on your machine, which he did because it was required to view some video he wanted to see, then the invasive auto-updater for it automatically tries to install iTunes unless you specifically uncheck the box during its update.

Quite a few inaccuracies in there

The iPhone emails video out in the H.264 codec, which is an industry standard developed outside Apple. It uses the MOV container format, which was invented at Apple but then expanded to become the industry standard MP4. You should just be able to rename the files.

So: it's not in any sense a proprietary codec and the container format is an industry standard.

Because Apple's QuickTime standard has become the basis for the industry standard that powers most video, including solid media formats like BluRay, and because Apple was the first company to provide a framework of video on the desktop, it's worthy of a "happy birthday" story.

Like a lot of tech it depends on the application as to its worth. On home desktops and HTPC's it's probably not as usefull as something like VLC however in film it's used a lot with camers such as the RED having a specific quicktime only plugin. Also with the ability to step frame by frame through a movie it's extreamly usefull for reviewing animation.

I just Googled this as was thinking something along these lines before I saw your post.

However...

I'm not sure 'nowadays' is accurate

It's been bloatware for as long as I can remember, even going back to whatever version was supplied for Windows 3.1. It's been reported that when Apple were forced to graft Carbon onto OS X, as a transition technology from the classic OS, they found an incomplete but much cleaner implementation of the usual QuickDraw/etc stuff in the Windows port of QuickTime and worked forward from that. I appreciate that the thing was meant to do a lot more than just video but throwing large chunks of the system libraries for an OS in there sounds like it was the offence.

At a guess, the culprit is whoever decided that QuickTime needed to be a 'multimedia platform' rather than just a video playback tool. Comparisons with Apple's feelings about Flash are entirely appropriate.

They've fixed it on the Mac side as of QuickTime X, by the way — it's a clean break reimplementation thing that really just plays a subset of the video codecs that classic QuickTime had accumulated with none of the wider aspirations. I've no idea how they would defend what they currently ship for Windows but I doubt the defence would be very convincing.

At least...

At least Apple actually make use of the Windows Scheduler for updating quicktime, so many other companies write their own cack that sits there all the time making a bad replication of the sceduler just to poll for or hold a port open for a push from an update.

DIE QUICKTIME DIE

QuickTime Player for windows is one of the biggest pieces of software dung ever created. The last time I checked, it STILL could not play full-screen videos without a paid upgrade to the "Pro" version.

Why camera makers and mobile phone manufacturers still insist on putting a stupid little QuickTime logo on their product boxes, encoding their video files in a .mov container, and forcing you to install this PoS, I do not understand.

Why the hate?

I get that Quicktime isn't perfect, but it effectively brought real multimedia to personal computers. Look back at the specs of the computers it first ran on and tell me that what it did wasn't impressive. Like C++, it had its flaws and was kinda clunky (especially at first) but it paved the way for everything else.

Re: Why the hate?

Because the traditional "But 'X' had 'Y' first, so Apple just **STOLE** it from them!!! Apple SUXXX!!!!!!!!!" response is shut off at the tap and the Geek Chorus needs to say SOMETHING negative after any article that mentions Apple, or what's the point of living...?

Hate isn't apple hating though.

Quicktime USED TO BE awesome when it came out; and even then, only in Macs. There was multimedia stuff that actually exploited the wider QuickTime stuff in the early 90's. But then something happened, QT on Windows sucked (same thing with iTunes), and QT suddenly became the same as realplayer, only with the fugly OSX theming stuck in it. No fullscreen mode, low resolution, etc. But realplayer at least could do fullscreen, and didn't look odd with forced OSX theming.

RealPlayer brought streaming audio to the masses

No alternatives

Agreed, it wasn't brilliant, but it was born in the days when the only alternatives were Microsoft's proprietary formats, "Real" Media's abomination or accepting humungous file sizes in the more basic formats. Quicktime and the format it spawned (MPEG4) have for some years now offered one of the best balances between file size, picture quality and processing requirements. www.apple.com/trailers used to be the benchmark in finding quality video files.

As a Windows user, I'd argue that this is one of the things Apple has actually given the industry.

No it didn't

Yeah, and the floppy disk brought real storage to personal computers and paved the way for multi-terabyte hard drives. Doesn't mean I don't hate having to use one now, though. Same with Quicktime. It's huge, slow to start up ('specially on Windows), and proprietary and I hate being forced to install it on someone's PC just because they bought an iPod.

Q: Why the hate?

Re: Re: Why the hate?

Because, as others have said, when you install itunes (like you are forced to, to reformat an iPod to work on Windows) it also installs Quicktime, some crap called Bonjour, and other resource-grabbing crapware without you asking it to, or without it telling you. And most people just leave it there thinking that it's fine to just leave it there. But in truth it's installed a bunch of services and is grabbing your CPU & memory, and trawling your hard drive, making everything else grind to a halt.

So the user calls IT support, moaning about how their computer has "got old" and they need a new one.

Man I hated using quicktime in the past. It was bloatware yes, and in the really old days it used to be about 25meg, which when you had your 500mb disk that was fairly huge.....

It was a toss-up between this and realMedia (realmedia had 1000 options you had to disable to stop it connecting to the web if you remember), so it was a really dark time for media.

realMedia also became bloatware fairly quickly.... but I always kept my old version (think it was real5 or something).

But thankfully everything was solved when winamp allowed you to play video and now obviously we have vnc or mediaPlayerClassic if you have to use windows.

Anyway - why do we have a report about this piece of software alone? It would of been good to have the entire story involving all the companies (real, winamp, windows media player etc) and comparing players. Instead we have something which feels like the work of mac fan boys saying Apple made video first....

anyone ever tried deploying

Pain in the a** Options saved in a per user file not the registry. Update settings in control panel quicktime and Apple software update. Msi is hidden away (like java). If Apple is anti plugin kill QT.

No streaming

Let me say that the QuickTime/MPEG4 container sucks. It has scalability problems because the structural and informational data atom 'moov' and the codec data atom 'mdat' can not be interleaved. A compressor must write to separate moov and mdat files until the end of the audio/video is reached, append the mdat atom to the moov atom, then re-index the moov atom to reflect the new data offsets in the mdat atom. Alternatively, the compressor can pre-allocate some space for a moov atom and hope it doesn't run out before compression finishes. A decompressor must buffer all moov atom before it can play anything from the mdat atom. In other words, it's not actually streaming. It's a total pain in the ass. This is why video cameras producing MPEG4 files are limited to a few minutes of operation at a time. This is why phones have trouble playing long QuickTime movies even if they have hardware acceleration.

The real kick in the nuts is QuickTime X. It was Apple's chance to drop all of the legacy baggage but the first step was using the ancient QuickTime container. There's nowhere for it to go now. It can't properly support streaming files like MPEG2 or AVCHD.

The exploding whale

I think the first video I remember downloading in the early 90's was the report about the exploding whale (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vmnq5dBF7Y - which, judging by the quality, is a copy of the original version). Before that, we had to make do with animated gifs (and I vaguely recall some "interesting" examples of that genre :-).

one for old mac hands

QuickTime

That is the extra text in the Get Info window of the QuickTime extension under the Classic Mac OS.

All in all QuickTime has been pivotal for the industry. Windows users see it as a bloated 'player' and it may be on Windows, but in reality it has been the multimedia architecture for the nineties on the Mac. I think we haven't seen a lot of films over the past 2 decades that haven't gone through QuickTime in some way or the other.

And .mov being a proprietary container? IIRC the MPEG group has chosen the file format for the MPEG4 specification.

QuickTime

@figure11 That is the extra text in the Get Info window of the QuickTime extension under the Classic Mac OS.

All in all QuickTime has been pivotal for the industry. Windows users see it as a bloated 'player' and it may be on Windows, but in reality it has been the multimedia architecture for the nineties on the Mac. I think we haven't seen a lot of films over the past 2 decades that haven't gone through QuickTime in some way or the other.

And .mov being a proprietary container? IIRC the MPEG group has chosen the file format for the MPEG4 specification.

Memory a bit hazy

But one of the things that blew me away about the Be OS demo In the early ninties was full motion video, 4 of them no less, mapped onto an interactive 3D model of a book. It made QuickTime look frankly pathetic.

Also, 5 second boot times, that was pretty awesome as well, part of me wishes Apple had picked JLG over Jobs.

Great on the Mac, steaming dung on the PC

As someone who straddles both the PC and Mac platforms as well as producing video for a living, I have a love hate relationship with it.

On the Mac it's a seamless experience. Works well, handles most formats, loads quickly. It is a decent container format for editing as it can hold lots of metadata to do with your footage as well. Apple also offer some really neat video codecs that are Mac only which are extremely useful in the professional domain.

On the PC it's slow. bloated and generally pretty rubbish. The only advantage is that you can access some of the codecs that Apple bundle with it. But it's still crap.

Incidentally I always send out either standard mp4, WMV or Flash videos to clients. Quicktime is only ever of use during the production process, there is no excuse to be exposing end users to it as most will be on the PC and will be required to download and install it.

QT 1.0 was really a product of a project that Apple took on in 1987 called 'Pencil Test'. The mission was simple: produce a broadcast-quality 3D animated movie entirely on Macs. There were a few obstacles: personal computers had never done it before. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXPHlQuXWR0

There's little point in comparing QT with other container formats because they simply didn't exist at the time and almost none of them make any attempt to do anything other than playback. Pretty much every decent (i.e. not AVI) container format since has followed QT's basic design (MPEG-4, Matroska).

QuickTime Player (up to 7.x) on Mac OS was one of the most underrated apps ever - it had comprehensive multitrack editing with as many simultaneous video/audio/text/arbitrary data tracks as you like, codec/frame-rate/colour-depth/sample-rate conversions, variable frame rates, timecode support, live arbitrary scaling, skewing and rotation, real-time audio mixing and eq, colour correction, video and audio effects, simple non-destructive copy/paste editing and compositing of video (without recompression). All this from an app that many thought was an equivalent of dumb playback-only apps like WinAmp and Windows Media Player.

QT completely dominated the world of digital editing for a long time, mainly because it was (is?) the only viable interchange format, and because of the massive array of applications and codecs that supported it. There have probably been very few movies made in the last 20 years that have not involved QT at some stage of production.

QT for Windows was always the runt of the litter - I know, I was Apple UK's QT for Windows support guy in 93/94. Much of this was down to the fact that QT depended heavily on the rest of Mac OS, so QT for Windows incorporated ports of large chunks of Mac OS, which made it very big and didn't really fit on top of Windows APIs very nicely. All the nice things like the Mac Sound Manager were severely hampered by Windows' dismal media support at the time (such as lack of sample-rate conversion and inter-app sound mixing). On top of that, there were of course almost no video apps for Windows save for playback; There was simply no market for professional video software on Windows back then.

While QuickTime's open file format was the basis for the MPEG-4 file format, much of the promise of QT was lost in translation - we're still waiting for all those MPEG-4 part 10 authoring apps. HyperCard was supposed to become QT's interaction layer, but that never got off the ground, and we all ended up with Flash instead (which QT could play to some extent too).

Apple pretty much gave up on promoting professional use of QT after 7.0. QT X has been relegated to being an iTunes appendage and headed off into playback-only land, and is no longer interesting. QT was so unbelievably good at what it did that it's almost criminal that Apple starved it of attention; it would have been great to see it spun out. Many of the things that made QT such a great authoring container have been lost, and the world of video is sadly retreating back to proprietary formats.